The railway minister's announcement that the railways will go in for digital mapping of its land to ensure the plots are not encroached upon and also take action against officials who turn a blind eye to such encroachments couldn't have come any sooner, say railway officials.
The railway minister's announcement that the railways will go in for digital mapping of its land to ensure the plots are not encroached upon and also take action against officials who turn a blind eye to such encroachments couldn't have come any sooner, say railway officials.
With the railway ministry trying to speed up plans of commercial development of station areas and railway land by giving more powers to the Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA) and other railway agencies, chances of encroachment going up only increase. These rule changes being debated include giving railway land on a lease higher than 45 years and also for residential complexes.
"It is not rocket science that slumlords keep a track of such developments, where some plot of land is to be commercially exploited, and before anyone realises a few shanties come up. It lays the railways open to legal hassles and delaying tactics by litigants, which in turn puts the plan to commercially develop the plot in cold storage," said an official.
Western Railway, from Churchgate to Dahanu, has some 3.5 hectares — 35,000sqm of land — encroached. Central Railway, much bigger than WR in area, has some 4.7 lakh sqm of land encroached. Removing the encroachments is a slow process, with CR managing to remove around 12,037 shanties between 2011 and 2014, while WR managing to remove about 3,076 shanties.
In its February 11 edition, dna had front-paged an article on how a 43,000sqm plot of railway land adjacent to Bandra station, estimated to fetch upwards of Rs4,000 crore when sold for commercial development, had been neatly divided into farming plots by unknown people.
The land is on the eastern fringe of Bandra station and has been given to RLDA to facilitate its sale. However, with the tenders for its sale not working out since last May, the land is in the custody of WR's estate department. Railways believes that thanks to the good connectivity of the land, it might fetch over Rs4,000 crore when auctioned.
The plot has been one of the most vexed and part of the long-running land dispute between the state and railways, with the fight going back almost a decade. It started in September 2008, when RLDA moved to auction the plot to garner revenue. The matter soon landed in court after the state claimed that the land belonged to it. The matter played out in the suburban collector's office as well the office of the divisional commissioner of Konkan before the state revenue minister gave his order on December 2012, adjudicating that the plot belonged to the railways. Last November, WR applied for a property card for the land.
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